Blogging: How Influential?

Scot McKnight asked the question several weeks ago, but I’m just getting around to this now… Blogging: How Influential? Turns out the answer is — perhaps as you’d expect if you’re at all ‘net-savvy — quite. Scot links a Time article and offers a bit of discussion on how blogging influenced the SBC leadership race.

The emerging church may also be judged by its blogs (is that a scary thought or a reassuring one? I can’t tell). One of my daily blogdigging tools is an RSS feed of Google and Technorati searches for blog entries that mention the emerging church. Sometimes I get some fairly wild (and highly inappropriate) results in there, but more often I get good stuff from blogs I don’t follow or may never have heard of. Such was the case with Frank Bellizzi’s post on The Emergent Church and Blogs. Frank is wearing a suit and tie in his photo on the blog, so I’m not sure yet if I’ll be able to read him regularly ;^) but I like the few other posts I’ve poked at so far. It’s only when he asks, “In what ways does the EC movement dovetail with and/or correct our [(Churches of Christ)] Restorationist tradition?” that I start to have nervous twitches, having had some rather bad experience with that viewpoint (which has been discussed elsewhere).

But this is about blogging. Blogging is a window on the emerging church, and based on what we’re seeing here, the emerging church may be judged by its bloggers. Note to readers: be warned, I can think of lots better people to go by than me.